Attack Beavers & Thanksgiving

We didn’t force Naomi to eat a turkey, but we considered making her shoot one. She is a vegetarian for health reasons, so my brother and I supposed that it would be fine to take her bow hunting down by the creek so long as we spared her from gnawing on whatever game she managed to kill. While this might seem cruel, Adam and I ranked her chances of a successful bow-and-arrow hunt low enough that the likelihood of intentionally wounding anything was fairly minimal. In fact the probability of her shooting straight up in the air, with the arrow plummeting down randomly at some later time, was high enough that we abandoned the woodland endeavor entirely.

While we did wind up taking Naomi shooting (we decimated several pumpkins) no hunting of live organisms ensued. While I am not a hunter myself, depriving Adam of the experience seems wasteful, as my brother is very good at overt manly activities. “Being a man” largely consists of making deadly weapons and wandering through the woods and always knowing which way North is. To illustrate Adam’s foresting inclinations, he referred to a “Fletcher” several times in conversation, which we originally thought was another fisherman. But it turns out that Adam has an uneasy truce with a local beaver, who he has named “Fletcher” and hopes to one day train to attack trespassers.

To some extent all of the males in the family have retained the no-nonsense functionality of an alpha male. As we prepared to make the trek to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, Naomi asked about giving my parents presents. I suggested that she give them several AA batteries, because as I recall a lot of my childhood consisted of trying to locate some for various gadgets. Only after both of his adult sons had graduated from college did Dad reveal that somewhere in the house he has horded away a “strategic battery reserve.”

So I suggested AA batteries, because Naomi was originally going to buy them flowers. Flowers! Dead plants which wilt the moment you buy them and are completely gone within three or four days. You might as well buy a bonsai tree, or a cactus, or possibly even an action figure, to increase the gift’s longevity. But such is not how most girls I know think. Naomi wound up giving my father an assortment of batteries, and gave my mother flowers, so everybody was happy.

Mom was particularly happy, because she has been desperate for an infusion of females into family events for several years. In preparation for Naomi’s arrival she demanded to know all sorts of factoids. What size shoes did Naomi wear? What was her dress size? Her blood type? I’m still not entirely sure what activities Mom foresaw, but they presumably enjoyed a lot of shopping and possible bodily injury.

Naomi, to her immense credit, withstood the many quirks of my family with aplomb. For example, my father only listens to two genres of music: 1. music recorded between the years 1960 and 1974, and 2. the sorts of jaunty big band tunes you would march in a parade to after defeating the Germans. Dad begins most of his days driving to work blaring bagpipe music, or “Songs on a Battleship.” When we went on family vacations as a kid Dad would drive us around the country blasting “El Capitan” by John Philip Sousa loud enough to shake the hubcaps off of passing sedans.

Naomi astutely pointed out that his choice of music was “uplifting.”